Oct 28 2008
Early Reading Books part 2
Another serise of early reading books we like are the “Step Into Reading” books, and other similar titles. There are at least two different publishers that make these type of books, but their levels and reading difficulty are very similar. We loved the level one books that also included pictures inside the text. There is a simple story, and some of the main words that will repeat throughout the book have a picture with them. Characters are used this way a lot, there’s a picture of the character with their name written underneath each spot in the story instead of just the character’s name appearing. We used these when we first started introducing reading. It allowed my daughter to ‘read’ parts of the story (I would read the words, pointing to where I was reading, and when we got to a picture, she would ‘read’ it.)
Letting her do this helped reinforce how a book was read (left to right, top to bottom), and got her to follow along with the righting instead of looking only at the illustrations as I read to her. These stories are also very simple, so now that she’s a little more advances, she is going back to these books and reading the words as well, and it helps that the stories are already familiar.
We read a lot of level 2 books now. They have simple words, although I need to help her with some from time to time as we haven’t gotten through all the long vowel rules in our phonics lessons yet. Most of these books are very commercial, which I personally didn’t like at first, but now it seems like a good thing to have books about beloved characters to really get a kid excited about the story.
Levels 3 and 4 get gradually more complicated, longer stories, and eventually move into short chapters.
Related posts: Early Reading Books part 1: Bob books
